Wheat And Dairy

I lost some weight last year in an effort to calm down my increasingly regular heartburn. Happily it worked, which has motivated me to keep an eye on my diet ever since. Whenever I mention this, people say “but you’re tall, you can carry a bit of extra weight…”, but I’ve got my explanation down to a fine art now. “Blah blah stomach acid, blah blah oesophagus, blah blah losing weight reduces pressure, blah blah blah.”
Actually I have secretly wanted to regain my youthful flat stomach for years but clearly this is so shallow and vain that I could never admit to it in public. Having a “medical reason” to eat less is the most fabulous cover for this entirely superficial aspiration. In reality I suspect that both my metabolism and my midriff have irretrievably outgrown a toned thirty-two inch waistline, but there’s no doubt that I feel more comfortable in the belt area since I reined in my expansive lifestyle somewhat.
Both Sashinka and a friend at work have recently extolled the virtues of a wheat- and dairy-free diet in terms of improved energy levels and weight loss. At one time I would have thought this a little faddish, but now I’m much more accepting of it. One of the things that helped me lose weight was replacing lunchtime sandwiches with chunky soup or small rice-based meals and now when I have the occasional sandwich I’ve noticed that it makes me feel quite bloated and sluggish.
Recently I realised that I have a similar over-full feeling in the morning after my muesli – however small a portion – so in the supermarket on Sunday I bought some soya milk instead of my regular semi-skimmed, to see if it made any difference. I approached it with trepidation on Monday morning, but one sip revealed this rather surprising fact: it’s actually really tasty.
It’s a bit like a thinner evaporated milk, or a weak vanilla milkshake maybe. I haven’t tried it in tea yet, but I imagine it would be good with coffee (I take mine black). It’s fantastic with cereal and, on the evidence of the first three days, the bloating is indeed absent. It would take a lot to get me to give up cheese (especially with pasta – wheat and dairy in combination!), but swapping one kind of milk for another is no great hardship, especially when I actually like the replacement.
I must have stared straight through it at the supermarket for years, believing it to be for “people with dietary problems”, but now I’ll be buying it regularly. It reminds me of when I finally shook off the misconception that exercise was purely the preserve of body-obsessed weirdos (don’t even think about relating that phrase to my flat-stomach comments above…) and discovered that it actually makes me feel rather good.
Anyone else had a similar change of perspective recently, whether food-related or otherwise?